Cure-alls and Remedies
Progressives are coming around to the idea that higher education is not a great leveler, and the segregated K-12 schools are increasingly a pipeline to prison rather than jobs for the least advantaged.
Thomas Edsall has a good review of some recent research on polarization in the New York Times today: The strength of a voter’s identity as a Democrat or Republican drives political engagement more than personal gain. Better educated voters more readily form “identity centric” political commitments to their party of choice, which goes a long…
I’m in Dallas, Texas for the the National Conference for Higher Education in Prison. Today I’ll be presenting a paper from a larger project on loyalty and social science research methods which draws on an argument I first encountered in Peter Levine’s work . Here’s a link to the PowerPoint of my talk. It is…
College in prisons is the easiest and most obvious of a host of criminal justice reforms that we absolutely must be making and for which there is bipartisan support. We incarcerate 2.3 million people in the US, at a rate more than seven times higher than the global average. We’re not seven times more violent or larcenous than the rest of the world–perhaps we are seven times more racist, but even that isn’t clear any longer–so we need to fix this over-incarceration crisis. But for the time being, educating the people we incarcerate is almost literally the least we can do.
In my last post before the election, I quibbled with Peter Levine’s strategic argument that Trump’s supporters might be momentarily richer than average, but only because they were older, maler, and whiter. I worried that it was a kind of mistake, even if it’s perhaps an analytic effort designed to enhance our ability and willingness to achieve…
Today I’ll be addressing a group of imprisoned students, university administrators, and prison officials to inaugurate the University of Baltimore’s partnership with the US Department of Education and Jessup Correctional Institution to offer Bachelor’s Degrees. We have a few tasks today, including inspiring the students and encouraging the officials that their support for the program…
What should schools do about the fact that politicians are frequently both wrong and immoral in ways that violate educational norms? How can civics education be civil if civic engagement rarely is?
A walkout makes sense. What makes less sense is coming back.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the middle-class exercise school choice through real estate decisions, and what that does to the fabric of our cities. Recently I came across a dissertation by Jennifer Burns Stillman that has some interesting references. Here, for instance, she addresses Barbara Ehrenreich’s account of the middle-class mentality . Much…
Recently I’ve been thinking about a book by Erin McKenna which I read as an undergraduate: The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective . I read it then because it promised to bridge the divide between my favorite genre, science-fiction, and my interest in philosophy. But the book profoundly changed me, and I’m…
[caption id=”attachment_3215″ align=”alignright” width=”224″] by flickr user ChrisM70[/caption] I’ve just finished an article on higher education and the liberal arts, and it’s full of hope and comes to some definite conclusions about particular ways that an education in the liberal arts is valuable. It’s out for peer review right now, which means that if the…
A showdown of sorts with Jonathan Haidt is brewing on The Stone. Michael P. Lynch gives us ” A Vote for Reason .” The judgment that reasons play no role in judgment is itself a judgment. And Haidt has defended it with reasons. So if those reasons convince me that his theory is true, then…
(This post is a continuation of Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Chicago Teachers’ Strike .) Another way of thinking about public sector unionization is as an effort to force democratic public institutions to remain accountable to the professional standards and know-how of those who work within them . Citizens want better, more accountable teachers, yet they…
I am one of those ideologically-impure liberals that worries a lot about public sector unions. On the one hand, I favor workplace democracy and collaboration; on the other hand, I worry about the fact that as union membership has declined, the majority of remaining union members haved tended to be at the top of the…
Megan McArdle’s Newsweek cover story, ” Is college a lousy investment? ” is an odd beast. Parts of it are really great, and there are some very important observations throughout to which my colleagues and fellow progressives should pay attention. But the title, framing, graphics, and many of the arguments are just silly, which makes…
Yesterday, George Mason University economists Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen announced MRU , a modular course design platform that they’ll be using to offer free and potentially paid courses in economics, online. I’ve learned a lot from their blog since I started reading during the run-up to the financial crisis, and I plan to at…
From Foucault’s Collège de France lecture on March 14th, 1979 (in what the publisher has misnamed The Birth of Biopolitics despite the fact that that year’s lectures basically spelled the end of Foucault’s work on biopolitics and focused on the limitation of state control over the market): What does it mean to form human capital,…
In my brief response to Community College Dean a few weeks back , I said something that I think is pretty obvious, but that is often ignored: humanities advocates spend so much time fighting the instrumental approach to education [because] you’ve got to pretend like time doesn’t matter, or else the education won’t work. Consider the…
Confessions of a Community College Dean takes on one of my cherished beliefs, that “Administrative Bloat” drives skyrocketing tuition : Never mind that this assertion has been empirically discredited, or that the “supervisory” ranks in colleges have shrunk even faster than the full-time faculty ranks. The only actual growth has been in IT, services for…
On Tuesday we had a university-wide faculty meeting on revising the general education requirements at Morgan State, and predictably President Wilson held up a copy of Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift and made some comments about how we had to do better while horribly mangling the actual findings of the book. Though there’s a lot…
Peter Levine asks, ” Why do we feel compelled to argue from decline? ” in areas where objective measures suggest progress or growth: You can care deeply about public education, civic education, teenagers’ behavior, or–if you must–gun rights, but there is no basis for arguing that these things are worse than they used to be….
Metafilter’s dgaicun shares this meta-analysis on regret, ” What we regret most… and why .” An excerpt: Education is the number one life regret, accounting for 32.2% of all reported regrets (SD = 1.89). This is a strikingly consistent finding, confirmed by a wide margin in all but two data sets (those exceptions being Landman et al.,…
DIY U by Anya Kamenetz (2010) A regularly updated version of this guide can be found here. I teach at the third-most expensive school in the country, where I regularly persuade students that they should major or minor in philosophy. For many students, this is a value question, and as I like to put it,…
Going to graduate school in the humanities, especially in philosophy, should be similar to converting to Judaism . Like rabbis, a student’s undergraduate professors should serve as a formal (but slightly secretive) part of the graduate school admissions process, situated as an obstacle or test for the student’s commitment. They should bend their efforts to…
Last week I did a Skype interview with Chris Long for his podcast on Socratic Politics and digital dialogue. We talked about Arendt, anonymity, and an attribution theory of identity. Listen here , or subscribe through iTunes . The whole series can be found at Chris’s blog , where he also posts personal reflections and…
I’ve always loved the cautious understatement in the title of Rawl’s A Theory of Justice . There’s a kind of bad faith humility implicit in the claim that you’re just offering the world another account of right and wrong, to be set on the shelves next to all those other cockamamie normative theories: nothing special, move along….
I’ve been distracted by travel… first I went to the Arendt Circle in Louisvlle, Kentucky, then to Pennsylvania where I selected a site for my wedding! I volunteered to become the Arendt Circle’s webmaster, which means my online time will be further divided between setting up a website for them, my time on metafilter, and…
Crooked Timber challenges us to discover the best first paragraphs of academic texts . They provide this example: “Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being. This is the core of my argument. For detail and evidence, go directly to the chapters; for implications, to the conclusion, which also has chapter summaries.” (Avner Offer, The Challenge…
Stun guns and tasers are less-than-lethal tools for controlling violent suspects. They serve to demobilize the target and cause serious, but not excruciating, pain. When a police officer uses a stun gun or taser on a suspect, they can usually count on that suspect going and staying limp. Because of this, it’s an extremely stupid…
So just a few weeks ago, I became engaged to this woman: Antoinette Capaccio. We went to college together, and she’s now a law student at Vanderbilt University. Pretty great, eh?
…it would be to run deliberative polls , or to assist in running them, or just to participate in one. Some questions for Professor Fishkin: how much does this cost? Do you generally run polls on public or private money? My idea is to get a bunch of rich philanthropists into a deliberative poll about…
The other night, my friend Steve Maloney was asking me whether politics, and specifically political theory, has been reduced to public relations. I like to think that, while it may be that our task is PR, (a) it may always have been, and (b) that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Peter Hallward has…
A fellow PSU alumnus, Dom Eggert over at Sentiments of Rationality , has been worrying about those crazy South Dakotans’ test-ban on abortions. He cites the reluctance of conservatives to actually criminalize abortion in the way that seems consistent with their views, i.e. by charging mothers who seek abortions with murder. The upshot of the…
Look, I’m not one for golden-age narratives. However, it has become increasingly clear to me that things are fucked in a manner unique to this place and time. Of course, there are all new possibilities, novel reasons to hope, that come out of this unique dilemma. But it also seems as if some of the…
Take the group of things we call ‘apples’. Let’s not get too technical, but merely admit that we mostly know what that word entails, and that we can therefore select members of the group from non-members when we go to the grocery store. We know not to put a potato on an elementary teacher’s desk,…